The Wall Street meltdown in 2008 brought the country to its knees and spawned nationwide protests against the lack of regulation and oversight in the financial industry. But the average American still fails to fully grasp what was--and still is--happening: that the inmates run the asylum. Larry Doyle exposes how financial executives, politicians, and even the regulators charged with overseeing the banks have conspired for personal gains while deceiving largely unprotected investors, consumers, and American taxpayers. He details the shocking corruption of the SEC, FINRA, and other "financial police, " painting them as meter maids who assess nominal fines and look the other way at even the most egregious abuses. Most importantly, he unveils the revolving door of Wall Street, where countless regulators (and plenty of legislators) are former or future employees of the very firms they're tasked with overseeing. Recent bombshells--such as multi-billion dollar trading losses at JP Morgan Chase, the manipulation of interest rates via the LIBOR scandal, and money laundering with North American drug cartels and rogue nations such as Iran--are symptomatic of this corrosive culture, which has decimated consumer and investor confidence. As the big banks fight tooth and nail to avoid real reforms, this book is a timely, important, and shocking look at a hopelessly compromised system, still defenseless against the next great crash.--From publisher description.

Financial collapses—whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market—are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified, and produced through the restructuring of corporations and the larger economy. Ho, who worked at an investment bank herself, argues that bankers’ approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Her ethnographic analysis of those workplaces is filled with the voices of stressed first-year associates, overworked and alienated analysts, undergraduates eager to be hired, and seasoned managing directors. Recruited from elite universities as “the best and the brightest,” investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. They are paid handsomely, with the understanding that they may be let go at any time. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. By connecting the values and actions of investment bankers to the construction of markets and the restructuring of U.S. corporations, Liquidated reveals the particular culture of Wall Street often obscured by triumphalist readings of capitalist globalization.

In the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration set out to radically remake America’s financial system—but Wall Street was determined to stop them. In 1933, the American economy was in shambles, battered by the 1929 stock market crash and limping from the effects of the Great Depression. But the incoming administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected on a wave of anxiety and hope, stormed Washington on a promise to save the American economy—and remake the entire American financial system. It was the opening salvo in a long war between Wall Street and Washington. Author Richard Farley takes a unique and detailed look at the pitched battles that followed—the fist fights, the circus-like stunts, the conmen and crooks, and the unlikely heroes—and shaped American capitalism. With a disparate cast of characters including Joseph P. Kennedy, J.P. Morgan, Huey Long, Babe Ruth, and Henry Ford (who refused to bail out his son’s bank, thus precipitating the meltdown of the entire banking system), Farley vividly traces the history of modern American finance and the establishment of a financial system still bitterly debated on Capitol Hill.

Provides a complete stock market chronology of the past 100 years, tracing the Dow Jones' advance, 28 to 2800, and including commentary on historic market forces. It also offers investors summaries, comparisons and yearly retrospects of long trends, and a seasonal almanac of monthly trends.

Who killed the economy? A page-turning, true-crime exposé of the subprime salesmen and Wall Street alchemists who produced the biggest financial scandal in American history "It's hard to have a guilty conscience if you don't have a conscience. Anything that benefited production - that benefited me and benefited my wallet - I'd do it." The sales force at Ameriquest Mortgage took this philosophy to heart. They watched the Hollywood white-collar-crime flick "Boiler Room" as a training tape, studying how to pitch overpriced deals to unsuspecting home owners. They learned how to forge signatures on mortgage paperwork and create fake documents in "cut-and-paste" operations they dubbed "The Lab" or "The Art Department." In this stunning narrative, award-winning reporter Michael W. Hudson reveals the story of the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage business by chronicling the rise and fall of two corporate empires: Ameriquest and Lehman Brothers. As the biggest subprime lender and Wall Street's biggest patron of subprime, Ameriquest and Lehman did more than any other institutions to create the feeding frenzy that emboldened mortgage pros to flood the nation with high-risk, high-profit home loans. It's a tale populated by a remarkable cast of the characters: a shadowy billionaire who created the subprime industry out of the ashes of the 1980s S&L scandal; Wall Street executives with an insatiable desire for product; struggling home owners ensnared in the most ingenious of traps; lawyers and investigators who tried to expose the fraud; politicians and bureaucrats who turned a blind eye; and, most of all, the drug-snorting, high-living salesmen who tell all about the money they made, the lies they told, the deals they closed. Provocative and gripping, The Monster is a searing exposé of the bottom-feeding fraud and top-down greed that fueled the financial collapse.

Sparked with wit and humor, this clever and insightful book provides clear evidence that the stock market is inefficient. In the author's view, models based on rational economic behavior cannot explain important aspects of market behavior. The book tackles important issues in today's financial market in a highly conversational and entertaining manner that will appeal to most readers. Chapter topics include: estimating expected return with the theories of modern finance, estimating portfolio risk and expected return with ad hoc factor models, payoffs to the five families, predicting future stock returns with the expected-return factor model, super stocks and stupid stocks, the international results, the topography of the stock market, the positive payoffs to cheapness and profitability, the negative payoff to risk, and the forces behind the technical payoffs to price-history. For anyone who wants to learn more about today's financial markets.

Left-winger Alex Mallum has strange dreams and unexplained blackouts. His rival, Luke Fenris, is the idol of Wall Street right-wingers. Each has secret revolutionary plans to change the face of American politics. Only Ludwig von Dracula knows the secret of the homicidal beast that binds these two rivals together but he's not sure he should intervene.